by wildcherry on Monday, February 8th, 2010 | News, Tech/Gadget | No Comments

Gmail is set to become Google’s next major push into social media. According to The Wall Street Journal, the popular webmail service will soon launch a new feature for sharing content and status updates with friends. [Update: We think Google might announce these features on Tuesday]

In other words, your Gmail contacts aren’t necessarily the same people you want to share status updates, photos and videos with. This is an issue that shouldn’t be overlooked in evaluating the new features Google is soon to unveil.

As WSJ points out, Gmail users can already update their statuses — sort of — through Gmail’s chat feature. Currently, this feature is more akin to the traditional IM “away message.” However, with this new social push, Gmail will offer a timeline-view of your friends’ status updates, just like on Facebook and Twitter.

Those updates might come from both Gmail and third-party services. According to WSJ, Google-owned YouTube and Picasa will be integrated into the stream. The huge question then is whether or not the new feature will include updates from Twitter and Facebook.

If so, the new features could be thought of more like a TweetDeck or Seesmic, looking to provide an aggregate view of your friends’ social media activities along with the ability to push status updates to the services you use from inside of Gmail. If not, it could be thought of as a major competitor to Twitter and Facebook as Gmail looks to covert its millions of e-mail users into adherents to a whole new breed of social media service.

Full article:Mashable

Tags: Facebook, gmail, gmail social, google, trending, twitter

by wildcherry on Tuesday, September 1st, 2009 | News, Tech/Gadget | 1 Comment

Google’s popular e-mail application Gmail is down Tuesday afternoon, in an outage affecting both free and paying users.

The outage began sometime around 1 p.m. Pacific time, and ended at approximately 2:25.

In a message posted at 12:53 p.m., the company wrote “We’re aware of a problem with Google Mail affecting a majority of users. The affected users are unable to access Google Mail. We will provide an update by September 1, 2009 1:53:00 PM UTC-7 detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change.”

The outage came just as Google has launched a rare advertising campaign that attempts to persuade companies to ditch Microsoft applications such as Outlook and Word for Google’s hosted Apps for Your Domain, which includes Gmail as its centerpiece.

Gmail suffered a wide and long outage on May 14 this year, which led many to worry about the reliability of so-called cloud computing services, where critical portions of companies’ businesses are handled by remote computing services, such as Google, Zoho and Salesforce.com.

The service remained available via remote clients, such as Outlook or the iPhone’s mail client, using POP3 or IMAP.

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but did acknowledge and apologize for the outage on its Gmail blog.

Tags: gmail, gmail blog, gmail down, gmail down september 1 2009, gmail not working 2009, gmail not working september 1 2009, gmail not working today, gmail outage, gmail problems, gmail status, google apps down, google down, google issues, google outage, google twitter, is gmail down, what s wrong with gmail, what s wrong with gmail today

by wildcherry on Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 | News, Tech/Gadget | No Comments

Screen shot of the Viddyho invite.
Google just can’t get a break today.

First, Google’s e-mail service froze for several hours, locking out millions of users. Now its chat service appears to be the conduit for a rapidly spreading phishing scam.

Gmail users who are logged into the accompanying chat service Google Chat have been getting messages that appear to be from friends, urging them to click on a TinyURL Web address that redirects to a Web site called “ViddyHo.” The site asks for the person’s Gmail log-in information and then sends out chat messages to all of the user’s contacts, spreading itself further.

The online service Twitter had a steady stream of complaints and warnings about the attack. “To anyone who receives a Viddyho invite from me, please ignore it,” a Twitter user named Zaffi cautioned Tuesday. “I think I’ve been duped.”

Avivah Litan, a security analyst with the research firm Gartner, said phishing attacks luring Web surfers to click on videos have been steadily increasing over the last six months. Consumers have “wised up” to e-mail messages masquerading as notes from banks and credit card companies, Ms. Litan said. Now, she said, phishers are sending video invites that play on hot topics and news events (in this case, a video starring the comedy troupe The Lonely Island and the singer T-Pain). While the video plays, the site might be downloading so-called malware in the background to infect the victim’s computer.

“These criminals really know how to get people’s attention,” she said. “It’s the modus operandi that’s favored by the crooks, and it’s working pretty well. They laugh all the way to the bank.”

For users who fell victim to ViddyHo, Ms. Litan recommends changing passwords and running a virus scan, although she warns that might not be enough. “In the really sophisticated cases, you could run 40 antivirus programs and it might not find any malware,” she said. “You may need to make a backup, delete everything and start over. That’s the safest thing to do.”

Tags: gmail, phising scam, viddy ho, viddyho